Passing the Torch

Sunday morning, an NPR reporter was collecting sound bytes at the anti-war rally in Eugene. One protester—who I assumed to be a woman of about my age—said something to the effect that she believed today’s young people would step up and “make better choices.” And I thought, “Why should they? What have we taught them?” Thirty-five years ago, we were those young people. And how we have been changed…

Back in the day, “everybody” was anti-war. Young men we knew and loved were carted off to fight in a stinking mudhole halfway across the world, never to return. We rebelled. We protested. We turned the country on its ear. The rhetoric was loud and often ugly. Some protesters paid with their lives. But there was a sense that we were on the noble side of the cause. The “establishment” wanted to purchase global dominance with the lives of our peers; we were on a mission to force the government to stop spilling our brothers’ blood. We were right. They were wrong. It was that simple.

How different is the business of being anti-war, this time around! This time around, there is no draft, so the apple-cheeked boy-next-door is not slogging through the mud and the blood against his will. This time around, the country has been turned on its ear, but not by those of us on the “noble” side of the cause. This time around, an oppressive cloak of contrived nationalism, predicated upon fear exploited to the point of paranoia, has been skillfully cultivated to snuff any protest against the whims of our “Commander-in-Chief” before it ever sees the light of day. Because this time around, WE were attacked. And though that attack had nothing to do with the country we chose to attack in revenge, it was easy enough to connect the two through our own poor understanding of an alien culture.

Let’s face it, Moms and Dads, Grandmas and Grandpas: we looked into the well-orchestrated dominance of the establishment, and we did more than blink. We cowered. We sat helplessly aside and watched the war machine juggernaut shock and awe the American people into a goose-stepping, flag-waving, spy-on-your-neighbor nationalistic frenzy. As a former “let it all hang out” flower child, I was totally unprepared for the fear that permeated my everyday life. Not fear of having my throat slit by some swarthy guy in a turban. Fear of sitting in a restaurant and expressing my political views where they might be overheard by a stranger. Fear of putting anti-war stickers on my car, lest it be vandalized or, worse, lest I be run off a bridge by a loyalist in a fit of patriotic road-rage. Fear of being branded the enemy and having my rights as an American stripped from me if I attempted to exercise them.

For three years, we have impotently nurtured our treasonous feelings in a society-imposed vacuum, unable to wrap our hands around the too-hot-to-handle anti-war torch. But three years of a senseless, endless, cancerous conflict have done our work for us. The administration has become hamstrung by its own web of lies. The pathetically inept attempt at empire building has cooled Americans’ lust for world domination. And now, the gray-haired, arthritic, menopausal, diabetic mid-century radicals can finally pick up the torch and limp forward a few steps with it…just to show our children how it’s done. Hopefully, we can make a good enough show of it to win the hearts and minds of those young people who we would like to see “make better choices.” And then we can hand them the torch and watch them run.

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